📌 Why It Matters
New Mexico’s water security is in crisis. New Mexico’s water security is at a tipping point. Decades of overuse, combined with climate-driven scarcity, are depleting aquifers and threatening the state’s ability to sustain communities, agriculture, and industry. Clovis, Portales, and eastern New Mexico communities and farmers are already experiencing severe impacts from the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer after a century of pumping. Without action, similar collapses will happen elsewhere across the state.
Aquifer depletion is not the only crisis. New Mexico is also overusing its surface water resources, putting additional strain on the Rio Grande and depriving downstream users, including in-state farmers. In the Middle Rio Grande, overuse amounts to approximately 26,000 acre-feet per year, while in the Lower Rio Grande, it reaches 18,000 acre-feet annually. The Rio Grande’s flow near Santa Fe has declined by 25% since 1988 and continues down due to global warming.
Despite these mounting challenges, state leaders are actively pursuing new industries that demand large amounts of water—exacerbating shortages and placing further strain on already overdrawn resources.
A State water problem-solving tool. The 2023 Water Security Planning Act mandates that the NM Interstate Stream Commission (ISC), subject to funding, “shall establish and conduct a regional water security program pursuant to the provisions of the Water Security Planning Act.” The regional water security planning program is intended to be a New Mexico regional and community water resilience problem-solving tool.
🚨 Key Issues with the Discussion Draft Approach
❌ Planning starts before defining the actual problems – Expensive, time-intensive efforts should not begin without clear data on water availability, use, and future risks.
❌ Water rights are protected, but water supply is not – Long-term sustainability measures must ensure water remains available for downstream users and future generations.
❌ Plans list prioritized projects but do not evaluate solutions – Scenario-based analysis must weigh feasibility, costs, impacts, and water savings before prioritizing projects and policies that in combination are the chosen initial regional water security plan.
❌ Public engagement is procedural, not meaningful – Stakeholders need real input in problem identification, solution evaluation, and decision-making.
❌ Implementation is uncertain – Plans must include funding mechanisms, monitoring, update, and accountability to ensure follow-through.✅ Proposed Guiding Principles for Effective Regional Water Security Planning
✅ Water planning is to solve water problems; the problems must be named.
✅ Data-driven problem definition must come before intensive planning.
✅ Legal water rights must be balanced with long-term water supply protection.
✅ Water planning must be grounded in independent science and holistic analysis.
✅ Regional planning must be efficient, practical, and produce actionable solutions.
✅ Stakeholder engagement must be structured to ensure meaningful participation.
✅ Planning efforts must be well-funded and include clear implementation pathways.
The ISC’s approach is not just inadequate—it’s a missed opportunity for real water security solutions. The NMISC 1/21/25 Discussion Draft Rules & Guidelines to implement the 2023 Act are minimal and don’t make sense. The discussion draft says nothing about the planning process other than constraints. It fails to address water security problems and risks. It appoints Planning Councils that will have dozens of members. It limits state funded planning efforts in each region to just two years and only two public meetings.
Limiting regional planning to two years does not allow sufficient time for comprehensive data collection, scientific modeling, stakeholder engagement, and long-term resilience strategy development. A more realistic timeline must be established based on the complexity of each region’s water challenges.
“For clarity, I offer this simple tool called CPR for Problem Solving. With very few exceptions it pretty much covers all the bases in any situation needing effective problem solving.(C) WHAT = Content(P) PROCESS = How(R) RELATIONSHIP = WhoThe rules and guidelines have a lot to say about WHAT, very little about PROCESS, and literally nothing about RELATIONSHIP. Relationships are FUNDAMENTAL to the success of a project of this scope and complexity. We are people!! We base so many of our decisions on the WHO. “
With these serious omissions, the discussion draft is an unsatisfactory initial response to the ISC’s fundamental statutory charge, which is to create, lead, and manage a program of regional water security planning that increases New Mexican’s water security. The ISC’s successful open houses in 2024 required contractors to provide most of the logistics and publicity. That increased awareness and caused some thinking. Now we need some thoughtful discussions and real process expertise input to lay out an effective statewide program.
For the planning program to be effective, the rules must provide a clear, high-level framework for the Regional Water Security Planning Program, defining objectives, responsibilities, and implementation processes. The rules must describe the relationship and roles of ISC, regions, and communities so that the planners and decision-makers understand the limits and trends of their water supplies and evaluate alternatives for improving their resilience. Groundwater only regions must evaluate what it would take to protect groundwater quality and quantity to meet the needs of future generations of New Mexicans.
Planning program roles must reflect the will of the legislature, which was to delegate the authority and responsibility for regional planning to the regional councils. The ISC’s roles include the initial statewide program design, promulgating the required rules and guidelines, funding and assisting regions in multidisciplinary ways, assuring the state gets value from its public water planning investments, and approving regional water security plans. Under the law, the ISC’s approval of a regional water security plan means the ISC endorses the plan and recommends it to the Legislature for matching implementation funding.
Regional councils are to lead planning efforts based on local needs, with ISC providing data, models, and technical and financial support either directly or through contractors. The ISC will provide statewide hydrologic data and modeling tools, but regional councils must also conduct localized assessments to ensure that planning reflects site-specific realities and community priorities. Regions will define their shared values and solutions to water security challenges and must conduct substantial public education, outreach, and involvement. The ISC ensures alignment with statewide objectives and approves plans. Coordination must be sufficient so that neither ISC nor regional councils are surprised by the others’ decisions.
The Discussion Draft Rules and Guidelines must describe in more than cursory detail the ISC’s design of the Regional Water Security Planning Program. They must incorporate the principles of rational water planning. They must define and require good process. They should be based on a vision, and that vision must be articulated.
🚀 Next Steps
Public comments on the draft Rules and Guidelines are due Feb 21. This essay and its companion regarding Guiding Principles for water planning contain the basis of the Water Advocates comments. Following the 30-day comment period, the ISC says it will consider the comments and then issue a second version of the Rules and Guidelines to be promulgated.
It’s unclear what opportunities the ISC will provide as part of its promulgation process for engagement and further consideration of comments before it finalizes the Rules and Guidelines, or what its schedule will be.
February 17, 2025 @ 3:56 pm
Thank you, Rob, for your detailed critique. I agree with many of your points, but disagree on your point of departure. New Mexico’s water management framework is called Active Water Resources Management. General Rules for AWRM present the AWRM framework in detail, and are now administrative law. The General Rules for AWRM are a practical interpretation of the 2003 law that is compiled at Section 72-2-9.1 NMSA 1978. The NM Supreme Court Opinion 2012-NMSC-039 upheld the law and the General Rules, saying the law is a new delegation of authority to the State Engineer to enforce water by priorities or by an equivalent shortage sharing agreement.
The Middle Rio Grande compact compliance crisis is upon us. My guess is we will see the beginnings of the carrots and sticks that OSE Deputy State Engineer Tanya Trujillo and General Counsel Nat Chakares presented in one of 2024 workshops, and that the ISC and the 2023 Water Security Planning Act will be part of the mix.
In the meantime, I urge blunt, professional criticism of the ISC’s misguided, reductive draft Rules and Guidelines by the ISC’s February 21, 2025 deadline.
As to your points, I have no argument with #1, agree with #2 except that I believe that regional water planning is voluntary, and totally agree with your #3, #4, and #5.
In the priority regions you describe, the Lower and Middle Rio Grande and the High Plains are three of them, time is a wasting while we wait on the ISC to have enough of a plan that they can persuade the decision-makers to fund getting started in earnest.
Norm
February 14, 2025 @ 11:22 am
Frankly, what was needed was a water management framework at the outset. I believe this whole approach was doomed from the start for the following reasons:
1) Regions should have been prioritized initially. Some aquifers are in dire trouble while others are doing fine so priority regions should be handled differently and receive most of the attention. OSE already knows (or certainly should know) which regions are in trouble and so prioritizing should have been relatively easy. Perhaps authorizing sustainability evaluations for priority regions would have been a good starting point for regional planning. These could have been done by the OSE Hydrology Bureau or the Bureau of Geology.
2) Without at least minimal requirements/goals from the state up front for priority regions, you can’t expect regional councils to do what really needs to be done in order to effectively address the problem. The state should have begun the planning process by identifying the issues and the goals. Unless you have a well-defined and stringent goal (e.g., stop the decline of the aquifer over a certain timeframe), don’t expect much in the way of results. Furthermore, there needs to be consequences for not meeting goals. In a nutshell, the state should be providing guardrails and a backstop.
3) The planners are focused on “Projects”. Projects were identified in previous water planning efforts, though few were implemented. However, these sorts of projects, though arguably beneficial, are very unlikely to reverse a declining trend in groundwater levels or a shortfall in surface water flows. What you have is a supply and demand problem because groundwater and surface water is over appropriated in priority regions. Projects to increase supply will never address the problem. In prioritized regions, unless you effectively address the demand side, you won’t reverse negative trends.
4) Usage data is insufficient in many priority areas to address the problems. Many of these areas lack metering orders and without solid knowledge of water use, your hands are tied. ISC has stated that this will be up to the regional councils, but this is ass backwards. OSE needs to have the huevos to issue metering orders in priority areas if they are serious about managing our rivers and aquifers so that regional councils have the data they need early on.
5) Funding solely by grants from the state is not a sustainable or reliable source of the funds that will be needed. For example, PVACD’s annual operating expenses are approximately $2,000,000. Regional councils need to be able to generate sustainable funding through fees or taxes and that authority must come from the legislature.
Those are my thoughts in brief.
Rob